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Close Read: Conjoined Twins

“Pakistan and Afghanistan are conjoined twins. Our suffering is shared, our joys are always shared,” Afghan President Hamid Karzai said yesterday. He was in Washington to meet with President Obama and President Asif Ali Zardari, of Pakistan, who had anatomical metaphors of his own, having to do with the Taliban and cancer. (It may be metastasizing—thousands are now fleeing the fighting in the Swat valley.) With some twins, the debate is over who is more handsome or pretty; with these, it’s over who poses the bigger foreign-policy challenge for the U.S.

The awkwardness built into the meeting became worse with news that dozens of Afghan civilians—perhaps well over a hundred—had been killed in what the Afghans say were American airstrikes. If the reports are confirmed, this will be the worst loss of this kind since the U.S. went into Afghanistan.

One villager reached by telephone, Sayed Ghusuldin Agha, described body parts littered around the landscape. “It would scare a man if he saw it in a dream,” he said.

The governor of the province, on speakerphone with “outraged members of the Afghan Parliament,” said that a hundred and thirty people had died, and described villagers bringing bodies to his office as evidence. One legislator told the Times that he “talked to someone he knew personally who had counted 113 bodies being buried, including those of many women and children,” and saw more being pulled from the rubble. The Pentagon is investigating, and suggests that there might be another explanation, citing “reports that the Afghan civilians were killed by grenades hurled by Taliban militants, and that the militants then drove the bodies around the village claiming the dead were victims of an American airstrike.”

Interesting thesis. But a U.S. Military spokesman said that Special Operations forces had “called in close air support in the area Monday night, including bombs and strafing with heavy machine guns.” An International Committee of the Red Cross team saw houses destroyed and dozens of bodies, including that of a Red Crescent volunteer and thirteen of his relatives. And Afghan villagers told the Times that the bombs came from the sky.